Illinois unemployment rate drop mostly good news

Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune

Applicants line up to sign in to be interviewed for jobs at Mariano's. The grocery store chain held a "career fair" on May 13 to hire new employees for the Bucktown store.

Applicants line up to sign in to be interviewed for jobs at Mariano's. The grocery store chain held a "career fair" on May 13 to hire new employees for the Bucktown store. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)

It's a pity that last week's good economic news for Illinois arrived during a heated campaign for governor so we can't simply have a nonpartisan moment of enjoyment.

The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate fell to 6.8 percent in July, according to the Illinois Department of Employment Security, down from 7.1 percent in June and 9.2 percent one year ago. It was the fifth month in a row that our jobless rate has fallen and marked the largest year-to-year drop in 30 years.

The IDES news release went on, "The unemployment rate also is in line with other economic indicators. First time jobless claims have been trending lower for the past four years and in July were about 17 percent lower than one year ago. Numbers from the independent Conference Board's Help Wanted OnLine Index show Illinois employers in July advertised for nearly 204,000 jobs and 85 percent sought full-time work."

Great!?

Well, what the news release didn't say is that we're still below average — the national unemployment rate is 6.2 percent — and doing worse by this measure than every Midwestern state save for Michigan, where last week's report showed a slight uptick to 7.7 percent unemployment.

Gov. Pat Quinn's campaign jumped on the numbers as proof that the incumbent is doing a good job, bringing the state back to the same jobless rate it had in August 2008, before he took office and before the near collapse of the nation's economy.

And I suppose that's fair enough, given that, had the month-to-month rate risen even slightly, Republican challenger Bruce Rauner's campaign would have sent out black-edged death announcements for Illinois and amplified the doom-and-gloom attacks on Quinn.

Illinois’ unemployment rate dropped to 6.8 percent in July, the lowest rate since late 2008, according to the Illinois Department of Employment Security.

July's unemployment rate was a significant drop from June, when Illinois' unemployment rate stood at 7.1 percent, the ninth highest in the nation,...

Instead they offered a "glass is still mostly empty" statement, saying that "celebrating today's job numbers is like cheering a touchdown when you're down 35 points with two minutes left."

But in truth, governors, like presidents, tend to surf upon or be crushed by economic waves that are largely out of their control. Taking blame or credit is part of the gig, part of politics, of course, as is spinning the numbers and trends in ways that can make them almost unrecognizable.

This was not great news. But it was encouraging news. It was better news than we expected.

And, like the other news last week that Illinois is actually middle of the pack — 27th — in its overall rate of business taxation, not so much cause to celebrate but reason not to panic.

Will Corkscrew go down this year?

The unofficial national champion in the first Vocabulary Bowl competition last year was Corkscrew Middle School in Naples, Fla. (named for a nearby swamp, not a beverage opening device), where inspired students racked up more than 220 million points by mastering online word challenges.

It was an unofficial victory because, for the 2013-14 school year, the Vocabulary Bowl was a series of monthly contests (Corkscrew won three times, beating out many high schools). The 2014-15 competition will run from September through April, with an online scoreboard at vocabulary.com/bowl to fuel the competitive fires.

The free website and paid app gauges each student's ability and provides appropriately difficult words, thus evening out the playing field across achievement levels and giving middle schools and even elementary schools a shot at the trophy.

Wall Street Journal language columnist Ben Zimmer is the producer of the site and the contest, and is as big a believer as I am that, even in an era when standardized tests are de-emphasizing knowledge of rare words, vocabulary skills are essential to learning.

Retweets

The funniest line on Twitter this week as voted by online readers of Change of Subject came from @jordan_stratton, who wrote, "I don't know, guys. The whole 'play dead when a bear attacks' thing sounds suspiciously like something the bears would come up with."

I voted for the runner-up, Saladin Ahmed's modern riff on "The Inferno." "Dante followed Virgil down, past killers and adulterers," he wrote. "'And here,' Virgil said, 'are the makers of websites that automatically play audio.'"

Read all the nominated lines and comment on this week's column at chicagotribune.com/zorn.